45 years ago Patricia Krenwinkel and her gang killed everyone they found in two luxury homes in LA - including heavily-pregnant film actress Sharon Tate

Carnage: Pregnant film star Sharon Tate, right, was one of seven killed

She is the longest-serving female prisoner in the state of California.

She is alive today only because the state briefly abandoned the death penalty after she was sentenced to the electric chair.

She is Patricia Krenwinkel... one of the murderous Manson Family.

In August 1969, 45 years ago this month, she was one of a gang who raided two luxury homes in Los Angeles and slaughtered everyone they found, including the heavily-pregnant film actress Sharon Tate.

They killed total strangers because their crazed cult leader Charlie Manson told them to. Never questioning his deranged beliefs, they committed one of the most notorious crimes of the 20th Century.

Now 66, still in jail with little prospect of release before she dies, Patricia Krenwinkel has broken a long silence to give her first on-camera interview – and she says she only got involved with the Manson cult because she wanted to be loved.

She was 19 when she met the charismatic small-time criminal, then 33, and 21 when she carried out his bloody orders.

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Mass murderer: American cult leader Manson

The product of a dysfunctional childhood, she was raised “in a house where silence was golden” before becoming a college dropout, drinking heavily and smoking dope.

“The thing I try to remember sometimes is that what I am today is not what I was at 19,” she says on film.

“I had never felt like I had fitted in. I never had that sense of belonging.

“I dropped out of college and I went to live with my sister. I was starting to drink and using marijuana and whatever my sister had around.

“I never ever developed a sense of who I was and where I was going and what I wanted to do.”

She slept with Manson the first night they met and was so mesmerised that she immediately joined his hippy “family”, which included several other girlfriends, and embarked on an 18-month sex and drug-filled road trip in an old school bus.

“I wanted to please. I wanted to feel safe. To feel like someone was going to care for me,” she said. “I hadn’t felt that from anyone else in my life.”

He based his deranged philosophy on a wild misinterpretation of the lyrics, telling his growing band of followers that the words written by Paul McCartney were a code predicting a coming race war between whites and blacks.

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Demon King: Manson, pictured during the 1970 hearing, had brainwashed all his followers

When that conflict failed to come about he told them they had to lead the way and show people how to kill.

He brainwashed Krenwinkel, then known as Katie, and the rest of his gang into total acceptance of his mad worldview.

“Katie” played a key part in the infamous murders. Late on August 9, 1969, she and other cult members went to the Beverly Hills home of director Roman Polanksi.

It had previously been rented by record producer Terry Melcher – a man Manson bore a grudge against.

Polanski was away, but his actress wife Sharon Tate, eight-and-a-half-months pregnant at the time, was at home along with several friends.

First Manson follower Charles “Tex” Watson shot and killed teenager Steven Parent in his car nearby. Then Krenwinkel broke in to the house with cult member Susan Atkins.

After surprising everyone inside, she dragged coffee heiress Abigail Folger from her bedroom to the living room and started stabbing her.

Folger managed to get outside but Krenwinkel caught up and pinned her to the ground, stabbing her again and again as she pleaded: “Stop, I’m already dead”.

There was so much that blood police who found the body thought her white nightgown was actually red.

Other members of the cult slaughtered actress Sharon and three more friends before melting away into the night.

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Mugshot: Manson in 2009

The gang struck again the next night, butchering grocery store owners Leno and Rosemary La Bianca in their LA home.

Manson was present to tie up the couple, but left after giving orders for the slaughter that followed. Krenwinkel played an active part and she scrawled “Death to Pigs” in blood on a wall and “HeaLter SkeLTter” on the fridge.

Chillingly, the killers stayed in the house for hours, eating, drinking and playing with the dead couple’s dogs before hitch-hiking back to their base on an isolated ranch.

It was December before the law caught up with Krenwinkel and five months more before she went on trial charged with seven counts of murder.

During the nine-month hearing, she never wavered in her devotion to the Manson cult and was often seen doodling Satanic images.

After guilty verdicts were pronounced she and fellow killers Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten followed Manson’s example by shaving their heads and carving an X into their foreheads before going back to court to hear their sentences.

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The family: From left, Van Houten, Krenwinkel and Atkins arrive in court with shaven heads

All were sentenced to the electric chair. But less then a year later California outlawed the death penalty and their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.

State execution was reinstated that November, but the brief respite allowed all the Manson killers to live.

In jail Krenwinkel slowly abandoned her beliefs and became a model prisoner with no disciplinary record. She studied for a degree and helped teach illiterate inmates how to read.

Locked up now for more than 44 years, she has been denied parole 13 times as an “unacceptable risk to public safety”. At a 2004 hearing, when asked who she had most harmed, she said, “Myself.”

She next becomes eligible for release in 2018.

Repentant: Patricia Krenwinkel

In her new interview, part of a short documentary by Olivia Klaus called My Life After Manson, Krenwinkel says she realised when she landed on Death Row at the age of 23 she would have to accept that “everything I had ever believed was now wrong”.

She adds: “To do that was going to be the most difficult thing I had ever done because I would now have to be fully responsible for the damage, the wreckage and the horror.

“It is countless how many lives were shattered by the path of destruction that I was a part of and it all comes from such a simple thing as just wanting to be loved.

“The saddest part is my definition of love is totally skewed. Today I take responsibility every day for every word I say, what I believe, what I do, I am who I am today. I learnt choice at the most horrific cost.

“I was killing for a way out. I found myself thinking there has to be more. That is how I looked at my life. It is broken beyond repair.”

None of those convicted of the Manson murders has been freed.

Susan Atkins died last year after being denied compassionate release when she was terminally ill with cancer.

Charles Manson himself, now 79, will not be considered for release until he is 92.